Removing your ovaries may be bad for your heart
Thousands of hysterectomies are carried out every year. Most of them are done in middle-aged women. Conventional wisdom has always dictated that the ovaries be removed at the same time to remove the risk of ovarian cancer. That is until now.
Recent findings about ovaries and hysterectomies
Research has shown that women who have their ovaries taken out during a hysterectomy are more likely to develop heart disease and to die from it, and more likely to develop lung cancer. On the other hand, they have virtually no risk of developing ovarian cancer and a lower risk of getting breast cancer.
What does this mean for you?
Over 400,000 women every year die of heart disease and stroke combined in the US. This compares with about 14,000 women who die from ovarian cancer each year. While ovarian cancer is a horrible disease, women are actually more at risk of developing heart disease in their lifetime.
What many doctors are starting to recommend is that, if hysterectomy is carried out for any problem apart from cancer and if you are not at high risk of developing breast or ovarian cancer, that the ovaries be left behind. This means that the hormones that the ovary produces even after menopause can continue to have a beneficial effect on conditions like heart disease, osteoporosis and dementia.
As with any other decision you take about your health, discuss all you options with your doctor.
Exercise can help prevent severe strokes
Apart from keeping you fit and helping to control excessive weight gain, exercise also reduces your chances of getting a severe stroke. Your level of activity before the stroke is strongly related to how severe the stroke is and how long it takes you to recover.
If you were physically active before the stroke, recovery time is usually shorter than for people who have not been physically active. Physical activity does not mean running a marathon! Housework, gardening, walking the dog and mowing the lawn are all forms of exercise.
Exercise keeps the heart and blood vessels healthy and helps in weight control. If you add a healthy diet, don’t smoke, reduce alcohol intake and have a healthy body weight, you can decrease your stroke risk by up to 80%. No medication can do that for you!
Grapefruit, cholesterol and high blood pressure
Many people take grapefruit juice every morning at around the same time they take their cholesterol or high blood pressure medicine. Grapefruit juice has been said to contain many substances that can prevent cancer and prevent hardening of the arteries (artherosclerosis) amongst other things.
Unfortunately, grapefruit juice also contains substances that block certain enzymes in the intestines. These enzymes normally break down cholesterol and hypertension medication that you take so that only a small amount of the drug goes into the blood. When the enzymes are blocked, more of the medication gets into the blood which can cause overdose.
These effects of grapefruit juice can last for some time so simply drinking it at a different time may still have negative effects, so you may have to stop taking it altogether while you are taking these medications.
Many of them are common drugs which a lot of people take for various conditions like allergies, hypertension, depression and psychiatric problems.